Republicans Vote Again Fact Checking Memo
Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers' Voting Machine Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows
Days before lawyers centrolineal with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his entrada had determined that many of those claims were false, courtroom filings reveal.
Ii weeks subsequently the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news briefing at the Republican Party'south headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory challenge that a voting motorcar company had worked with an election software business firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.
Only there was a problem for the Trump team, co-ordinate to court documents released on Mon evening.
Past the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump'due south entrada had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims almost the visitor, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.
The court papers, which were initially filed belatedly last week as a move in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.
The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion fifty-fifty as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed iv federal lawsuits accusing information technology of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.
According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, and so the campaign's deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to "substantiate or deflate" several matters concerning Rule. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together past his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.
Fifty-fifty though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:
-
That Dominion did non use voting applied science from the software visitor, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.
-
That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.
-
And that there was no evidence that Dominion'southward leadership had connections to left-wing "antifa" activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.
Equally Mr. Coomer's lawyers wrote in their movement in the defamation adjust, "The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at to the lowest degree internally, the Trump campaign found in that location was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion" and Mr. Coomer.
Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph Westward. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. Only the faux theories they spread chop-chop gained currency in the conservative media and endure near a yr later.
Information technology is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; notwithstanding, the documents suggest that his campaign'due south communications staff remained silent well-nigh what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.
"The Trump campaign continued to let its agents," the motion says, "to accelerate debunked conspiracy theories and defame" Mr. Coomer, "apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories."
Image
Mr. Coomer, Dominion'southward onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump entrada and others final year in land district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company'south systems to ensure Mr. Trump's defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had washed so.
Presently after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were office of a self-described "elite strike forcefulness" of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory.
On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee's headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion's voting machines. Past Ms. Powell's account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a "massive influence of communist coin."
Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to letters seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking annotate.
Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in contempo months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last calendar month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were "essentially true."
And every bit recently as three weeks agone, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was "substantially a bloodless insurrection where they took over the presidency of the Usa without a single shot being fired."
It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the courtroom documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had non seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared information technology.
"They wanted Trump to lose considering they could raise more coin," Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the degradation.
Just at the time that the internal report was prepared, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell were both "active supervisors," as he put information technology in his degradation, in the Trump campaign'south broader plan to challenge the election results — an endeavour that eventually included more than 60 failed lawsuits filed across the country. While Ms. Powell soon went her own mode in claiming that Dominion had conspired to steal the election, Mr. Giuliani continued working closely with Mr. Trump and his campaign, ultimately changing strategies and seeking to persuade state legislatures to overturn the pop vote.
The motion notes that "the lines were blurred" as to whom Ms. Powell was working for at the fourth dimension: herself, her nonprofit organization or the Trump campaign. Well-nigh immediately afterwards she promoted the conspiracy theory about Dominion at the news conference in November, Mr. Trump sought to distance himself from her. But by December, equally Mr. Trump'due south legal options narrowed, the old president considered bringing her back into the fold and discussed whether to appoint her as a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud.
The release of the documents was just the latest legal problem for Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, both of whom have been sued directly past Dominion for defamation. Rule has likewise brought a defamation suit against Mike Lindell, the master executive of MyPillow, for amplifying false election claims. Last month, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the cases could continue moving toward trial.
About the same time, a federal estimate in Detroit ordered penalties to be levied confronting Ms. Powell and viii other pro-Trump lawyers — Mr. Giuliani was non among them — who filed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the ballot results in Michigan using the faux claims about Dominion.
"This instance was never about fraud," the estimate, Linda V. Parker, wrote in her decision. "Information technology was about undermining the people's faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to exercise and then."
In June, a New York court suspended Mr. Giuliani's police force license, ruling that he had made "demonstrably false and misleading statements" while fighting the results of last year's election for Mr. Trump.
Even recently, the new courtroom documents say, old Trump entrada officials have continued to cling to the groundless notion that the election was marred by fraud.
When lawyers for Mr. Coomer asked Sean Dollman, a representative of the Trump entrada, in a deposition if the campaign still believed that the election was fraudulent, he answered, "Yeah, sir."
The lawyers then asked, "What is that stance based on?"
According to the court documents, Mr. Dollman gave a less than certain respond.
"We have no underlying definite facts that it wasn't," he said.
Susan Dominus , Shay Castle and Mindy Sink contributed reporting.
braunsteinfinece1954.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/politics/trump-dominion-voting.html
0 Response to "Republicans Vote Again Fact Checking Memo"
Post a Comment